Shaving cream and gel products are typically packaged in pressurized metal canisters and can be purchased by consumers at drug, discount, and grocery stores. The canisters are generally stored in the home at room temperature, usually in a medicine cabinet or other bathroom cupboard, resulting in a dispensed shaving product that is at room temperature or a slightly lower temperature due to the insulating effect of the metal canister.
To provide a more pleasant shaving experience, it is often desired to warm shaving cream or gel prior to applying it to the skin. A warmed shaving product provides a more comfortable and effective shave by opening skin pores, softening facial hair, and soothing shave-abraded skin.
To heat the contents of ordinary shaving cream or gel canisters in the home, the canister must be placed in standing hot water or held under running water. Because the product that it is most desired to warm is the product that will be dispensed first, generally located at the very top of a pressurized canister, these methods of warming the canister and contents are inefficient and most often not effective at reaching the desired product because it is located within the canister beneath the dispensing mechanism. Barbers and other professionals use electric heating devices that dispense a warm shaving lather mixed with hot water. Electric heating devices used by barbers, however, are expensive and are often too bulky to be used in a home environment by an ordinary consumer.
Other attempts have been made to create a device to warm shaving products. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,095,122, to Liewiecki et al., discloses a device for dispensing the contents of a pressurized dispenser in a warmed condition. A cylindrical heat-conductive chamber is permanently attached to a can and the chamber is closed by a cover and filled with a heat-conductive and distributing material, for example metallic wool. In use, the chamber is heated by holding it under a hot water faucet or in a hot air blast.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,655,552, to Aiken et al., discloses a heat transfer cap assembly for use with a dispensing canister containing a pressurized product. The cap assembly defines a volume for retaining hot tap water to heat gel in a thermal conductor forming a conduit between a nozzle adaptor and an outlet in the side of the cap assembly. An initial use of the dispenser assembly will require depressing a trigger button to fill the gel conduit with pressurized shaving product for heating.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,217,937, to Kasparian, discloses a pressurized dispensing can that has a main compartment for storing the product to be dispensed and a hot water compartment that is an integral part of the can above the main compartment. In use, a cap on the hot water compartment is removed, hot water is run into the compartment, and the cap is replaced.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,024,987, to Myles, discloses a device for a pressurized container that is detachably threaded onto the end of a water faucet for a continuous supply of hot water therefrom to heat a lather product in the container. U.S. Pat. No. 3,111,967, to Bullard, discloses another approach. In the Bullard patent, material from a can is dispensed into the cap and the cap is held under hot running water to heat the dispensed material in the cap. The cap is then removed from the running water and the shaving lather is taken out of the cap by the fingers and applied to the shaver's face.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,175,733, to Lerner, the contents of a dispenser are discharged into a circuitous passage within a unit attachable to the top of an aerosol dispenser. The contents are heated within the passage by hot water that is placed in the unit through an opening on the top cover.
While the above-described devices provide a warmed shaving product, the devices are complex, expensive to manufacture, and not compatible with commercially available shaving cream and gel canisters. Therefore, there is a need for a simple, inexpensive device for quickly and effectively heating the contents of a shaving cream or gel canister.